Archive for the 'Connected Curriculum' Category

Open Data can be understood as “universally participatory data”, which is openly shared by government agencies, NGOs, academic institutions or international organisations.

Open Data is already being used in Higher Education using real life scenarios, bringing together students, academics and researchers working towards overcoming local and global real problems.

In this way students can develop transversal, research and citizenship skills, by working with the same raw materials researchers and policy makers use, contributing with the society in new and yet-unimagined ways.

In many disciplines, anecdotal evidence from teachers shows that students don’t often see research datasets or the research/lab logs, but these are fundamental tools to comprehend research work, workflow and processes, however, we believe students should be given the opportunity to work analysing datasets to conduct discoveries of their own and/or to attempt the replication of research findings, enabling students to understand good practices in data management and data analysis skills. UCL is proud to host this event on Friday, 4 March 2016 from 14:00 to 17:00.

ABC Curriculum tour dates for 2016 and Summary of 2015

For questions and workshops contact Clive and Nataša

Book us early! We start our ABC 2016 tour with a visit to Glasgow!

The ABC curriculum design method uses an effective and engaging paper card-based approach in a 90 minute hands-on workshop. It is based on research from the JISC and UCL IoE and designed to help module teams design engaging learning activities. It is particularly useful for new programmes or those changing to an online or more blended format. More information below.

December 2015 – ALT Winter Conference webinar

The ABCs of rapid blended course design by Clive Young and Nataša Perović. Recording of the session is available to view here: http://go.alt.ac.uk/1NIpziZ

December 2015 – A brief overview of ABC curriculum design method by Clive

Teams work together to create a visual ‘storyboard’ showing the type and sequence learning activities required to meet the module’s learning outcomes and how these will be assessed.

ABC is particularly useful for new programmes or those changing to an online or more blended format.

Between March and September we had 11 workshops with 37 teams from SLMS and BEAMS.

The feedback from participants:

“This process was really useful. It helps us think about the modules in their entirety. It is really good how everything maps out in a clear framework like this.“

“We haven’t had such level of detailed discussion as a team. I think the structure and the materials are facilitated well. “
“It is a good way of focusing on creating the balance within a course.“

“It makes you think about: OK , we are going to use this technique, but where, how, for what and how does it fit with everything else? And this is the way into that, I think.“

“It helped us formulate in our own mind the course structure. Yes, very useful.“

“Made me more conscious of a formative assessment, which really did not occur to me before. “

“This has been extremely useful. Not only that we start to think about individual modules and how we can use electronic resources, but it makes us think about the degree together, rather than as separate modules. “

“It reminds you of all different formats that you can use, rather than sticking to the same old same old.“

“I think it was good to take a step back from the content and look at the varied type of activity. “

“We are not trying to be very innovative, but it is a question of being open to new ideas“

To organise ABC workshop for your programme contact Clive Young and Nataša Perović.

This post is several weeks (months?) overdue. Motto: Good things come to those who wait. Maybe. It’s been a laborious project. Some things just take a while to compile.

Back in April, UCL had its annual Teaching and Learning conference. My colleague Mira and I had proposed a session on Domain of One’s Own. Our session had been accepted, however, we had been allocated a mysterious new conference format: Fair.

From the FAQ:

The fairs are being tried out because we could not accommodate all the submissions that the reviewers wanted to accept. Instead of a room where a single presentation is going on, there will be three or four (or five, in one case) parallel ‘fair’ sessions of half an hour each. The rooms are quite large so this should be perfectly viable.

Each fair presenter will be allocated a table area which seats 8 people maximum (but there is no reason not to expand that group within practical constraints on the day if needs be). In other words, it is a tutorial-size arrangement.

Um. Ok. I have to be honest: I was disappointed. I had hoped to have a bigger audience. And also: how was this supposed to work? Would we have screens? Projectors? Wifi? No idea. Would it be a laptop or simply a tablet in the middle of the table and eight people craning their necks in order to see? The fair just didn’t seem fair at all. Meh.

When life serves up such annoying little hurdles, I grumble a lot at first¹, then eventually reach for my favourite Tom Stoppard quote:

We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.

[Player, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead]

But how do you turn a big traditional conference slideshow inside out? Well, of course, you make it small and on paper, but keep to the usual stuff, the slideshow, more or less. – No, not A4 handouts. That would be lame.

The only format that seemed truly suitable for this type of conference session was ………..

THE POP-UP BOOK. Yeah!

Only one small hiccup: I had never made a pop-up book before. How does one make a pop-up book?! One turns to YouTube, of course. Isn’t that what everyone does these days when the need to learn anything arises … ?

And so over the course of a day or two I watched probably every video tutorial there is on pop-up cards and books, from the simple

to the impressively complex (but downright scary):

Ok, so it was clear that Peter Dahmen’s creations were way beyond what I would be able to accomplish. Yet I still added his tutorials to my watch list because he provided ideas and insights into the different techniques I could consider using for my much more modest project.

I started with a rough draft of a storyline and possible pop-ups for each of the main slides in the slideshow Mira and I had presented at previous events.

Towards the end of a long weekend of snipping and gluing, my living room looked like it had been attacked with a confetti bomb.

The resulting pop-up book was interactive: full of little hidden surprises, it could be passed round for the audience to take active part in the session. It was a resounding success.

“You should make a video of it””, my audience demanded.

Oh noes! Another creative challenge. *grumble*

Luckily, the list of video tutorials I had watched during prep included this gem:

I tried the photography method suggested in the TED video, but found it so difficult to get any kind of stable continuity. There are too many little interactive bits and my A5 book is much smaller than the one in the TED video: it lacks the weight to stay firmly put in one spot. Also, there’s not much scope for hiding any kind of stabilisation props, such as paper clips and bulldog grips. The whole thing was very frustrating. In the end I found it easier to just set my phone camera on time-lapse and edit out any duff frames afterwards.

Editing was another painfully fiddly process. It took several days to do. Many re-edits later the result is still far from perfect, but I give up now trying to improve it further. Life’s too short. So much to do, so little time and all that.

Looking back on it, in spite of the niggles and frustrations this has been a very rewarding project to do. I learned so much about paper folding and video editing in the process. Most of all, it’s been a fantastic project for practising patience!

It was absolutely the right thing to do for the round-the-table session format: tangible and much more memorable than just another slideshow.

____________________________

¹ It’s part of my creative process – a bit like a problem identification and assessment system. Or something.

What happened when staff on one module encouraged students to openly license the online products of their assessed group work?

Object Lessons is a module on Bachelor of Arts and Sciences at UCL. In keeping with its object-based nature and emphasis on inquiry and collaboration, part of the assessment is a group research project to produce a media-rich online exhibition. Because the exhibitions are lovely and shine a light on multimodal assessment, the teaching team are frequently approached by colleagues across UCL with requests to view them. In considering how to get students’ permission for this, Leonie Hannan (now at QUB), Helen Chatterjee and I quickly realised a few things. One, highlighted by an exchange with UCL’s Copyright specialist Chris Holland, was that the nature of the permission was hard to define and therefore hard to get consent for, so we needed to shift the emphasis away from staff and the nuances of their possible use scenarios, and onto the status of the work itself. Another was that since the work was the product of a group and could not be decomposed into individual contributions without breaking the whole, consent would need to be unanimous. Then there was the question of administrative overhead related to obtaining consent and actually implementing what students had consented to – potentially quite onerous. And finally the matter presented us with some opportunities we shouldn’t miss, namely to model taking intellectual property seriously and to engage students in key questions about contemporary practices.

We came up with four alternative ways for students to license their work ranging incrementally from open to private. We called these:

1. Open;
2. Publish;
3. Show;
4. Private.

You can read definitions of each alternative in the document ‘Your groupwork project – requesting consent for future use scenarios’ which we produced to introduce them to students. As part of their work students were required to discuss these, reach a unanimous consensus on one, and implement it by publishing (or selectively, or not at all) the exhibition and providing an intellectual property notice on its front page. That way staff would not have to collect consent forms nor gate-keep access.

Before we released it to students I circulated the guidance to two Jiscmail discussion groups (Open Educational Resources and Association for Learning Technology) and worked in some of their suggestions. A requirement that students include a statement within the work itself reduces the administrative overhead and, we hoped, would be more future-proof than staff collecting, checking off and filing paper records. While making it clear that students would not be at any deficit if they chose not to open their work, we also took a clear position in favour of Creative Commons licensing – the most open of our alternatives, since as well as flexibility and convenience it would potentially lend the work more discoverability and exposure.

What did the students choose? In the first iteration, out of ten groups:

Five opted for Open. Between them they used 3 different varieties of Creative Commons licence, and one submitted their work to Jorum;

Two opted for Publish;

None opted for Show;

Three opted for Private (including one which didn’t make a statement; since the group kept the work hidden this defaults to Private).

We haven’t yet approached the students to ask about their decision-making processes, but from informal conversations and reading some of the intellectual property statements we know that there are different reasons why half the students decided not to make their work open. One was the presence of elements which were not themselves open, and therefore could not be opened in turn. From evaluations of a number of other modules, we know that the students were not generally all that enthusiastic about the platform they were asked to use for their exhibition (Mahara, which is serviceable but vanishingly rare outside educational settings). This may have contributed to another factor, which was that not all group members felt the work reflected well on them individually.

Then there’s the matter of deciding to revoke consent, which is something individual students can do at any time. In the context of group work we decided that what this would mean is that if any group member decides at a later date that they want to reduce openness, then this effectively overrides other group members’ preferences. That doesn’t work in reverse though – a student can’t increase openness without the consent of all other group members. So here we are privileging individuals who want to close work, although we do encourage them to consider instead simply ending their association with it. We have yet to find out how this state of affairs works out, and it may take quite a while to find out. But so far it seems stable and viable.

We would be very interested in your views, suggestions and any experiences you have had with this kind of thing – please do comment below.

The ABC curriculum design method is a ninety-minute hands-on workshop for module (and programme) teams. This rapid-design method starts with your normal module (programme) documentation and will help you create a visual ‘storyboard’. A storyboard lays out the type and sequence learning activities required to meet the module’s learning outcomes and how these will be assessed. ABC is particularly useful for new programmes or those changing to an online or a more blended format.

The method uses an effective and engaging paper card-based approach based on research from the JISC* and UCL IoE**. Six common types of learning activities are represented by six cards. These types are acquisition, inquiry, practice, production, discussion and collaboration.

The team starts by writing a very short ‘catalogue’ description of the module to highlight its unique aspects. The rough proportion of each type is agreed (e.g. how much practice, or collaboration) and the envisaged blend of face-to-face and online.

Next the team plan the distribution of each learning type by arranging the postcard-sized cards along the timeline of the module. With this outline agreed participants turn over the cards. Each card lists online and conventional activities associated with each learning types and the team can pick from this list and add their own.

The type and range of learner activities soon becomes clear and the cards often suggest new approaches. The aim of this process is not to advocate any ‘ideal’ mix but to stimulate a structured conversation among the team.

Participants then look for opportunities for formative and summative assessment linked to the activities, and ensure these are aligned to the module’s learning outcomes.

The final stage is a review to see if the balance of activities and the blend have changed, agree and photograph the new storyboard.

The storyboard can then be used to develop detailed student documentation or outline a Moodle course (a module in Mooodle).